FORTY years ago the life of people with learning difficulties in South Holland was enriched when a club opened giving them access to better leisure facilities.

Gateway Club is still going strong and members celebrated that remarkable anniversary on Friday with a party and disco at their weekly venue, Broad Street Methodist Church in Spalding.

More surprising still is that many of the original members go to the club and some of the volunteers who help out each week have been going from the beginning.

Among them are Maurice and Vera Chappell, of Glenside South, West Pinchbeck, who say that up to the point that the club opened there was virtually no provision for people with learning difficulties.

“If you had offspring with learning disabilities, you had a job for life,” say the couple whose daughter Claire was born in 1965 with Down’s Syndrome. “The Education Act didn’t come in until 1971 with compulsory education for everyone. Initially, the club really enriched their lives in so many ways, such as giving them opportunities to go away.”

They recall that the medical officer for health for South Holland at that time, Dr Fielding, asked Betty Edmonds, who was then headmistress of the Garth School, to run a small training centre for people with learning difficulties in order to provide a break for parents.

Betty went on to form the Mencap Society with a small group of parents and, just after Claire was born, Maurice and Vera joined too – in fact, Vera was on the Mencap committee before Claire was born and Maurice went on to become chairman of Spalding Mencap.

Maurice says: “On the Mencap committee we had two young ladies, Jane Lacey (Merriott) and Sue Billings (Waters) and they suggested we ought to do something like the Gateway Club. It was a gateway to better leisure facilities really and they were the driving force behind it. We got involved in it and it was mainly to give parents a couple of hours break on a Friday night.”

Maurice approached the Rev Tony Gledhill, who invited the group to meet at Broad Street Methodist Church, and Maurice says: “He received us with open arms and Broad Street has been really fantastic to us ever since and never charged us anything.”

There have always been willing volunteers, both from the church and the community, including David Houghton who has been helping for almost 40 years, and Henry and Mary Belton.

Maurice says: “Over the years we have had a lot of help from the schools, particularly Pat Lake, who would send her top year pupils from the Gleed Girls’ School, and that went on for a lot of years. Pat did the catering for the party.

“The ideal situation would be one to one, but over 40 years we have done exceptionally well with the people we have had. They have all been brilliant people and most of them have no connection with learning disabilities at all. A number have died – 40 years is a long time.”

The diverse skills of the helpers helped to widen the range of activities that members enjoy, such as snooker, table tennis, tennis, sewing, wood work and crafts when they had volunteers with an interest in those topics, as well as weekends away.

The group began with about 40 members and that number has been maintained, although Vera believes there could be more. “They love coming,” she says. “Over the years they have done lots of things, and it’s such a shame that more don’t come.”

Various charity groups as well as individuals have helped to make sure that people living in scattered communities had transport to the club, with Rotary, Lions and Round Table clubs all helping. Maurice says South Holland Rotary Club and Spalding Lions are still paying for transport.

Eventually, the club got its own mini bus, which is shared with the Garth School, and needed volunteer drivers. There have been a number of those, but Maurice and Vera mention two, David Houghton and Charles Cherry, who has just stopped driving the mini bus at 80 but is using his own car instead.

Currently there are four or five people who help regularly, most of them like Maurice and Vera in their 80s, and Vera says it is now harder to get people to volunteer. Maurice and Vera haven’t missed many Friday nights at the Gateway Club, other than holidays or illness, but say they will carry on as long as they can. They add: “We appreciate the dedication of the people who have come to help us over the 40 years – and we’d be very pleased to see more helpers too.”

To find out what goes on at the Gateway Club go along on a Friday night between 7pm and 9pm.

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice.
If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the
Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the IPSO by
clicking here.

Spalding Guardian provides news, events and sport features from the Spalding area. For the best up to date information relating to Spalding and the surrounding areas visit us at Spalding Guardian regularly or bookmark this page.

For you to enjoy all the features of this website Spalding Guardian requires permission to use cookies.

Find Out More ▼

What is a Cookie?

What is a Flash Cookie?

Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?

About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

Revenue Science ►

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Google Ads ►

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Digital Analytics ►

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

Dart for Publishers ►

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore ►

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Local Targeting ►

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

Grapeshot ►

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Subscriptions Online ►

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This ►

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.